This is no doubt the right spirit in which researches into the early history of language should be conducted, and I hope that Mr. Edkins, Mr. Chalmers, and others, will not allow themselves to be discouraged by the ordinary objections that are brought against all tentative studies. Even if their researches should only lead to negative results, they would be of the highest importance. The criterion by which we test the relationship of inflectional languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, cannot, from the nature of the case, be applied to languages which are still in the combinatory or isolating stratum, nor would they answer any purpose, if we tried by them to determine whether certain languages, separated during their inflectional growth, had been united during their combinatory stage, or whether languages, separated during their combinatory progress, had started from a common centre in their monosyllabic age. Bopp’s attempt to work with his Aryan tools on the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and to discover in them traces of Aryan forms, ought to serve as a warning example. However, there are dangers also, and even greater dangers, on the opposite shore, and if Mr. Chalmers in his interesting work on “the Origin of Chinese,” compares, for instance, the Chinese _tzé_, child, with the Bohemian _tsi_, daughter, I know that the indignation of the Aryan scholars will be roused to a very high pitch, considering how they have proved most minutely that _tsi_ or _dci_ in Bohemian is the regular modification of _dugte_, and that _dugte_ is the Sanskrit +duhitar+, the Greek θυγάτηρ, daughter, originally a pet-name, meaning a milk-maid, and given by the Aryan shepherds, and by them only, to the daughters of their house. Such accidents[28] will happen in so comprehensive a subject as the Science of Language. They have happened to scholars like Bopp, Grimm, and Burnouf, and they will happen again. I do not defend haste or inaccuracy, I only say, we must venture on, and not imagine that all is done, and that nothing remains to conquer in our science. Our watchword, here as elsewhere, should be Festina lente! but, by all means, Festina! Festina! Festina! Part II. ON CURTIUS’ CHRONOLOGY OF THE INDO-GERMANIC LANGUAGES. In a former Lecture on the “Stratification of Language” I ventured to assert that wherever _inflection_ has yielded to a rational analysis, it has invariably been recognized as the result of a previous _combination_, and wherever _combination_ has been traced back to an earlier stage, that earlier stage has been simply _juxtaposition_.